Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, a day in the church calendar when we celebrate the arrival of the magi to give their gifts to the infant Christ and the day that also marks the end of the twelve days of Christmas.
I have been trying to imagine this feast as it must have felt to Christians hundreds of years ago, to my ancestors in northern Europe for example. One thing that I love about Christmas is that it takes place during the darkest time of the year. Of all of the pagan holidays to appropriate for the birth of the Christ-child, surely a holiday celebrating the winter solstice is a great place to start. And, yes, I know that Jesus was more likely born sometime in April. I don't care. People who point that out tend to be annoying anyway. The point is the arrival of light in the middle of darkness, the glory of the only Son from the Father driving out the darkness. To imagine that the symbolism of the day chosen is not important is unimaginative.
Not to put words in the mouth of my northern European ancestors, but I imagine that the celebratory mass and 12 days of feasting meant a lot to them in the middle of winter. We are so protected from weather and darkness in our culture that we cannot conceive of what it must have been like to endure a winter with very minor restraints from the bone-chilling cold and the all-pervading darkness. I read the other day that part of the reason we are so fat is that we don't spend any time being cold anymore. In our overcalorified, enlightened (literally) era it can be difficult to grasp what Christmas must have meant, how anticipated it must have been, how melancholy that last night of the festival must have been. That last night of feasting before a season of privation and darkness.
However, I did not intend to write ruminations about our coddled inability to appreciate winter festivals, but rather to celebrate with the church the arrival of the magi, those mysterious Asiatics with their inscrutable gifts. This year during Advent we would read our devotional and then sing a Christmas hymn. Invariably we sang the classic "We Three Kings," a song that features prominently in my recollections of childhood Christmases but which I dropped as kind of cheesy sometime around the millennium. As we sang the words, though, both Clara and I noticed a depth to the song we neither remembered nor anticipated. (The tune still kind of sucks.)
The verses, for those who like me do not remember them, track each gift given to the baby Jesus. The first is gold:
Born a king on Bethlehem's plain
Gold I bring to crown him again,
King forever, ceasing never,
Over us all to reign.
The next gift is frankincense:
Frankincense to offer have I;
Incense owns a deity nigh;
Prayer and praising, voices raising
Worshipping God on high.
And, finally, myrrh:
Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.
I am ashamed to admit that before reading these lyrics I had never before made the connection between these gifts and their purpose, or what they say about who Jesus is. Gold for a king; incense for a deity; myrrh for a dead man. Each gift evocative of another aspect of the manifold glory of Christ. I got chills reading that, and on this day when we remember and celebrate the wizards who tracked down Jesus it is wonderful to reflect on how much foreknowledge they were given into the life of our Savior.
T.S. Eliot taps into this in his poem, "The Journey of the Magi", where the now elderly king remembers the journey and the mystery of the birth they encountered:
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
What the magi came to witness was not merely the birth of a beautiful child, but the certain knowledge that this child was born to die, born for Death, in a manner in which no other mortal could be. In celebrating Christ's birth we celebrate his death. In reflecting on the infant laid in the manger our minds are inexorably drawn to the man upon the cross. The season itself is infiltrated with death. The magi brought in their wake the genocide of infants surrounding Bethlehem, when impious Herod tried to hold onto power. And reflection on death is as it should be, which is to say that it is not morbid, at least in a pejorative sense. All three things were heralded at Christ's birth: his kingship, his divinity, and his death. Amen.
The song ends:
Glorious now behold him rise,
King and God and sacrifice;
Alleluia, Alleluia,
Peals through the earth and skies.
As the twelfth night wraps up, let us remember that. Though embalmed he rose. And when he returns he will return as king forever.
